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Monday, September 22, 2014

FoundationDB adds SQL personality to its database

Summary: Although organizations are exploring No-SQL and Big Data
databases, many would like to access these data stores using a SQL
interface. FoundationDB is now offering a SQL "personality" for their
key-value store database.

During my last discussion with FoundationDB's
Dave Rosenthal and Ori Hernstadt, they mentioned that the company was
poised to announce a SQL layer, or "personality module", designed to
allow developers already familiar with SQL to easily use FoundationDB
for transaction-oriented or big data applications. (See "FoundationDB: Back to the future with key-value store" for more information on FoundationDB and key-value stores.)

The company just launched SQL Layer as an add-on product to its FoundationDB database. Here's a quick take on the announcement.

SQL Layer

Here's what the company has to say about the product:

The SQL Layer is an ANSI SQL engine that stores its data in the
Key-Value Store, inheriting its incredible properties. It is best suited
for operational (OLTP) applications with high concurrency.

FoundationDB's SQL Layer makes its highly distributed, key-value
store database appear to be a single SQL database to applications. What
the company has actually developed is a stateless "layer" that
translates and stores all data in their Key-Value Store. The
architecture was designed to provide a familiar interface to the
back-end data grid. FoundationDB presents this approach as providing a
high level of scalability and fault-tolerance.

Snapshot analysis

At first glance, this announcement isn't earth shattering, but it is
an important step in making FoundationDB a more friendly tool for all
those SQL-trained developers out there. It can hide a key-value store
database approaches behind a traditional structured query language
personality without sacrificing any of the flexibility, scalability or
reliability of the underlying database.

This is a good move for the company and will make it easier to get
developers to look at FoundationDB. While I don't expect these
developers to suddenly decide to move all of their enterprise
applications over to this platform, I do believe that it will be easier
to get them to try it out.